'Assassin's Creed III' Review - Part One: Into The Great Wide Open

Assassin's Creed III is an impressive looking game with tremendous scope. But while it gets many things right, it falls short of greatness.

For the first few hours of Assassin's Creed III I couldn't quite decide if I was enjoying myself.

That's not necessarily a bad sign, though it's not a great sign either.

For one thing, the game starts off slow.

There's an origin story within an origin story, and while that makes for some neat twists, I still found myself wondering when things would really pick up pace.

Get on with it already, I'd like to actually play the real protagonist of the game (because no, you don't start off as Connor.)

So how does Assassin's Creed III stack up against the rest of the franchise and against other major releases this Fall?

To be honest, it's a bit of a mixed bag - definitely a step up for the franchise, but not a step quite far enough.

I'm about halfway through the game so far, and while it continues to improve as I play, certain aspects of the game remain disappointing.

We'll take a look at what Ubisoft gets right and what they get wrong with their latest action adventure title - a game that I do like, by the way, and in some ways like very much, but that I still find comes up short.

Halfway Toward Good Combat

Combat is certainly a step up from previous Assassin's Creed games, though it has a long ways to go before I'd call it "great."

In short, the combat is both fun and unsatisfying.

The reason for this paradox? That's a bit complicated.

The fights tend to be quite visceral but the AI is often simply terrible.

Sometimes they'll all go for you at once, and sometimes they'll just stand around while you slaughter them one by one. Occasionally an enemy will simply stand there, all by himself, not doing anything at all until you kill him.

The system of parrying and responding with critical combo moves is extremely simple and while it's all impressively fluid I wish there were more depth.

It's still fun, mind you, because those critical combo moves look really cool, but there's so little skill involved for an action title that I can't help but feel disappointed.

For all its appearance of action combat, it really boils down to just parrying all the time and making sure to use your attack button right afterwards.

If the parry window were smaller this could easily be remedied. Timing would become important - maybe even aiming. If the AI wasn't so mind-bogglingly stupid it could be even better.

As it stands, however, combat is a nicely animated experience that lacks any real depth. For a game that spends so much time in combat, this is a real shame. There's promise here, potential even, but ultimately only the shell of a great mechanic.

Worse still are the quick time events. I do not want to press X and then press Y a second later when a wolf charges me. Just let me fight the wolf like I would any other attacker for goodness sakes.

Halfway Toward Good Stealth

Fortunately there are many stealth elements in Assassins' Creed III as well, including both optional missions that require you to go through a sequence undetected or without killing anyone as well as required stealth missions that result in desynchronization should a guard see you even momentarily.

It would be better if the entire game allowed and rewarded you to play in stealth mode. Dishonored did a great job of presenting us with an assassination game that gave players a wide range of choices between stealth, non-lethal, and hack-and-slash. Assassin's Creed III goes partly in that direction, but never quite far enough.

Still, there's plenty of gratification to come from dive assassinations or the vicious rope dart and its capacity to hang an enemy.

Of course, since in most instances you could just as easily murder all your foes in melee combat, the stealth component feels unimportant. It would be much more gratifying if those enemies really posed a threat, if the only way to get through a mission was to sneak or at the very least take out some of the badguys surreptitiously prior to all the hacking and slashing.

It would also be nice if the AI could detect you more easily, and if the interface gave more clues as to whether you were at risk of being spotted or heard.

In other words, there are some good stealth elements here, but Ubisoft never goes quite far enough to make them truly matter. And the UI overall feels like it could convey more information more easily than it does, though you do warm up to it slowly.

A Compelling, Jumbled Story

The game's story isn't half bad, even if its treatment of the American Revolution is a bit garbled. That garbling of history is basically necessary in a game like this.

Halfway through, I'm still not sure quite what to make of Connor's relationship to the separatists, or what role the Templars are really playing.

I think this is partly due to not being all the way through the game yet, and certainly that's my hope.

As it stands, Connor's faith in the colonists is horribly placed. The British are portrayed in a pretty negative light, but there's no salvation for Connor's people waiting at the hands of the Americans. Quite the opposite.

I admit, this all has me intrigued. I'm prepared to be deeply annoyed if the story takes us down any number of very historically bizarre paths, but I think this could also lead to some very nice twists.

And while we do verge on "noble savage" territory from time to time, it could be much worse.

There are also a number 0f historical events you participate in, such as the Boston Tea Party or the Battle of Bunker Hill among others.

For the most part I find myself enjoying my time spent in the story, even if there are too many cutscenes and too much voice-acting for my taste. It's not a game that deserves huge praise for writing or acting, but it isn't bad by any means and can be quite good at times.

Don't come looking for great depth or an escape from stereotypes, archetypes and various other irritating conventions, but then you weren't going to play this game for a break from this sort of thing to begin with, were you?

The City and the Forest

The busy streets of Boston feel more fully realized and more lived in than any of the previous metropolises. The graphics are quite lovely, both in towns and cities, on the open water, and especially in the lush forests of the New World.

Without a doubt, this is one of the best looking games to hit consoles this generation, and while that means the occasional dip in frame-rate, it also makes for a really excellent level of immersion.

Boston is absolutely brilliant, the most convincingly realistic depiction of that city and time in a game that I've played.

I love the costumes, the hats, the great attention to detail. I'm less fond of running into Samuel Adams or Benjamin Franklin as this just throws the ridiculousness of the plot into sharp focus, but I suppose I'm just being picky on that point.

The big, mostly open world is fun to explore.

There are all sorts of animals to hunt and tasks to complete.

You can swim or hop on your ship and go fight naval battles, or you can travel to the big city and run across rooftops, find perches at the top of steeples and court houses, or follow any number of side-quests or the main story.

The one thing I still can't really get into with the Assassin's Creed III games is the modern component. This may be the basic crux of the entire plot, but I still think it's pretty dumb. You take this grand historical landscape with all this delicious, immersive stuff going on and then you shatter it entirely by zapping us back to the present. It's disappointing every time.

Side-Quests Add Hours Of Content and Exploration

Speaking of side-quests, there's all sorts of ways to stay busy in the game aside from the main plot.

You live on your homestead, where you train to become an assassin, but while you're there you can do any number of other things. Set traps for rabbits and deer, or go find settlers on Settler Missions, who will then produce new goods for you to craft or trade.

The crafting system is simple but the addition of a trade component makes it much more fun than it would be otherwise. This can be a good way to earn money for various upgrades like new outfits, weapons, and consumables.

Between finding new vantage points, trinkets, settlers, and the myriad other side missions both small and large, the game is absolutely brimming with content. Perhaps this is its best feature - there's so much to do, and it always (or almost always) manages to be fun and a bit addictive.

Adding new settlers to your homestead and unlocking new weapons, crafting items, and natural resources all gives the game a bit of a strategy element. I half expected to find that I could build and place buildings, start a copper mine, or plant crops at my discretion. Maybe even levy some taxes and do repairs after a natural disaster...

"Assassins’s Creed has only ever been about one thing. You peer around the city looking for something tall. You find a steeple, a dome, a minaret, a belltower, you grab on to a ledge or a window and you start to make your way up. One jump at a time, moving steadily, plotting your course. The noise and slashing on the street grow more distant as you make your way up. At the top there’s a weathervane, a peak, a small piece of wood. You climb it. Low strings play as the camera sweeps out to reveal a vast city in front of you – your character is still there, but he seems small in front of the seething story of stone and sky."

Assassin's Creed III carries on this tradition.

The running-across-rooftops and tree-branches mechanic is quite fluid, perhaps even too fluid. It's never hard to run from branch to branch. The only real challenge is in reaching certain hard to access areas.

That may be the problem, however. I wish there were more obstacles and more challenges that made this free-flowing system more risky. Broken shingles, weak branches - anything to make the choice of going topside a bit more difficult to make.

But when you do make it to the top of that massive tree or the cross at the perch of a steeple high above Boston, the view is grand. I can't help but enjoy taking it all in, and even the more familiar setting feels grand and lovely from way up high above it all.

Naval Warfare Is Great

So far, I find the naval warfare component quite good actually.

It's not easy, but it's also not particularly gimmicky.

Naval missions require a whole new skill set to accomplish.

Ducking incoming cannon fire requires good timing; turning the ship is an appropriately laborious task, and lining up to fire across enemy decks or at an enemy fortress is an awkward feat, and strangely rewarding when done successfully.

In other words, the naval warfare is where some real skill comes into play. If only more of this concept were transferred over to the actual combat we'd be in good, fighting shape.

And like every other aspect of the game, you can upgrade your ship, adding canons and other useful components to make it sturdier and more resilient.

What to expect in Part Two

I plan to cover the third quarter of the game as well as its multiplayer gameplay in Part Two, with a final installment that sums everything up and gets into spoiler territory with the game's story and ending.

I'm big about completing lots (if not all) of the side missions, finding all the little vantage points, and basically synchronizing the hell out of the game, so I'm not going to race through it. I haven't raced through it thus far either and since I find the exploration in the game to be quite a lot of fun, I don't plan to race through it going forward.

Many things, from graphics to exploration, are done quite well here, but combat is important in an action game, and it doesn't quite hit the mark it needs to hit. Stealth would be greatly improved if the combat had higher stakes as well.